This audiovisual essay draws on primary research into the production process to develop perspectives on creative choices, the factors that shaped them, and their consequences for audience experience and understanding. Using the methodology of the audiovisual essay enables the research findings to be articulated dynamically and experientially, making use of the formal potential of soundtrack, image, and duration in a way which brings both the filmmakers’ journey and its implications for their audience to life.

In 2007–2008 I followed the production of an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel The Cry of the Owl, visiting the shoot on location in Canada, attending a producer conference during picture editing in London, and sitting in on different elements of the sound mix in Hamburg. I had detailed conversations with several of the filmmakers and recorded interviews with writer/director Jamie Thraves before, during, and after production. I was given access to different versions of the script and to more than one rough cut.

My purpose was to investigate how the significant choices in the finished film – identified through critical analysis – came to be made.¹ Which were long-held designs? Which resulted from dynamic collaboration during production? Which consequential aspects of the film were a creative response to material realities and constraints? I published the results in written form in Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism in 2012.²

For interesting reasons, the film had a rocky – indeed, remarkably unfortunate – distribution journey. It received a minimal theatrical release, and while it has been shown on network television it was chiefly consigned to be ‘straight to DVD’. (The cover of the UK DVD release features an image of a shadowy figure wielding an axe – there are no axes in the movie.) Then, and now, this seems a travesty for a thoughtful and complex film which deserved an audience. It also meant there was a limited academic readership for a novel production history of a film that few people had heard about.

In recent years I have moved to conducting most of my research in the form of audiovisual essays. Convinced that videographic approaches might address the research questions in different and revealing ways, I have returned to The Cry of the Owl (2009), focusing on a set of choices (and constraints) around licensed music.³ In a way that conventional written scholarship would struggle to do, the form of the essay, with its interruptions and repetitions, and the alternative versions it presents, is designed to evoke something of the experience of the filmmakers, provide insight into the ways in which meaningful decisions came to be made, and to give the listener an experience of how things might have played out differently. If the video essay also encourages cinemagoers who missed The Cry of the Owl first time around to seek it out, so much the better.